The following is a list of current technology stories that I find interesting but haven’t had a chance to write about yet. If you happen to be familiar with any of the concepts listed below and would like to contribute some thoughts on your experiences, please contact me using the options listed on my bio page or post a comment in the comments field below.

1. Skype for Business. Have you started using Skype as a communication channel in your business? How has it changed your business?
   
   
2. MySpace  for Business. Have you created a MySpace page for your business? Is it generating any business for you?
   
   
3. Treo vs. Blackberry. Has your business flip-flopped between Treo phones and Blackberries? If so, why?
   
   
4. Public WiFi Initiatives. Are you involved in the planning, advocacy for (or against), or execution of public WiFi systems? What challenges are you facing? What have you learned that would benefit other communities to hear about?
   
   
5. RSS Beyond Blogging. Are you using syndicated content as a marketing tool for your business? How has this changed your business?
   
   
6. Web Based Office Applications. Have you or your business moved away from Microsoft Office to online office applications like Writely? How has this changed your business?
   
   
7. Gmail for Business. Has your business switched to using Gmail for Business? If so, what challenges did you face in the migration, and how has it changed your business?
   
   
8. Ning. Have you built a web application using Ning? Why did you choose to use Ning, and what have you learned from building it?
   
   
9. Flock. Do you use the Flock web browser? If so, what has made Flock a valuable browser for you surfing needs?
   
   
10. Canceling Cable. Have you canceled your cable subscription in exchange for web based video content? If so, what factors motivated your decision? What online content motivated the change? Which applications are you using to aggregate online video content?
    

I have some familiarity with all of the above story ideas & businesses, but would love to hear about your experiences in order to write better stories for everyone else reading this site. Share what you can. Let’s learn from each other. Also, if you can think of some important stories that I should be covering, feel free to send a quick email explaining what and why.

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I’ve been dabbling around with the mobile versions of some websites I use frequently on my Treo and have learned a few things about what I like and don’t like about current implementations. But before getting into that, let me say that my favorite mobile websites are actually not mobile sites at all. They’re websites that continue to be usable on my Treo without discovering a special mobile version.

Here’s what I’ve learned so far:

The Good:

Bloglines (www.bloglines.com/mobile): The web interface used on Bloglines uses frames and JavaScript, which makes it fairly mobile unfriendly. This is resolved in the mobile version by dropping the frame, then displaying the feeds in an outline structure. Much of the additional functionality, such as saving posts as new, e-mailing posts and saving posts are still usable in the mobile format.

<rant>If you think it’s annoying to view truncated feeds using a computer, wait until you try it on a mobile device that forces you to click through to a non-mobile web page to view full posts. <rant>

The Bad:

Gmail (m.gmail.com): Gmail suffers from over-optimization of their interface for mobile users. The biggest problems:

1. You can’t select, then delete multiple e-mail messages, forcing users to click on each message, wait for it to load and then send it to the trash using a link at the end of the e-mails

2. Message body pagination. My Treo can load hundreds of kilobytes of content on a page, but Google Mobile truncates messages into painfully short pages. This may be useful for some mobile devices, but makes long messages unreadable on Treos. For example, one popular newsletter I receive is broken into 14 pages on Google Mobile.

The Ugly:

Dodgeball (www.dodgeball.com): Dodgeball is a service based on using mobile devices, yet doesn’t offer a mobile interface for their website. What makes matters worse is that their site is as painfully unusable as a site could be on a Treo, without being completely unusable. For example, it requires images be turned on because they don’t use ALT tags on their navigation. The pages become gigantic from a mobile perspective once graphics are turned on.

Dodgeball has the most to gain from a mobile interface because many more users would join the service if they could do so while hanging out with friends who just told them about the service.

What do you think?

What sites would you like to use on a mobile device, but can’t due to poor mobile design? Are there any sites you find particularly useful for mobiles today?

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I have been a Treo user since the Handspring Treo 300 first came out.  Moved to the Treo 600 right when it became available, then the 650 once again right away.  I love the ability to use the entire smartphone with one hand and no stylus (of course, I can use a stylus if needed).  The only thing I don’t like about the Treo is the fact that it runs atop Palm OS, which in my mind is severely lacking.

Enter the Sprint PPC-6700 Windows Mobile 5.0 smartphone.  It has most everything I like about the Treo, a keyboard, nice screen, 5-way navigation button, and wireless options to connect to headsets, car kits, etc.  The PPC-6700 even has an option I wish my Treo had: WiFi.  When I was in a local Sprint store recently I decided to pick one up.  I have 14 days to try it before I can no longer return it, and the end of those 14 days is almost upon me.  Do I keep it or return it?

Before making this decision, I analyzed exactly how I use the smartphone in my everyday life.  My largest usage of the device is e-mail, followed by the phone itself, then calendar and contacts.  Being able to run the device for a full day without charging it is a pretty big deal as well, I can’t be stopping every 4 hours to wait for my smartphone to get a charge, and I don’t want to carry an extra battery with me everywhere I go.

The PPC-6700 does a fantastic job at contact management; she thinks exactly like I do when syncing all of my contact and calendar data.  Unlike the awful Palm hotsync process, the 6700 keeps everything in sync while you’re plugged into the computer.  If you’re plugged in and you make a change to your Outlook calendar, that change will appear in real time on your 6700.  Add or change a contact, it changes in real time on the 6700 as well.  You can browse the device and even view the miniSD card, or install applications on it directly from the Windows desktop.  This is a vast improvement over the Palm way of doing things:  hotsync, pray, repeat.  If I didn’t know better, I would say that Apple built the syncing software for it runs a lot like an iPod: plug it in and it just works (sorta).  My only gripe here is that unlike an iPod, the 6700 would randomly disconnect from the computer.  For no reason it would just stop syncing.  I would have to unplug the smartphone and plug it back it to get my computer to recognize it for 10 minutes, maybe an hour, then it would stop syncing again.  Minor annoyance, but still a vast improvement over the Palm hotsync process (if you can’t tell by now, I hate the hotsync process).

But what about my 2 big items: e-mail and phone?  E-mail is severely lacking on the 6700.  On the Treo 600 and 650 I have access to a fantastic e-mail program called Chatter E-mail.  This program allows for true push e-mail without the need for any special software on the server or any NOC.  It uses the IMAP Idle command to keep your smartphone and e-mail client constantly up to date.  This works great with Exchange (even 5.5), and most IMAP servers out there.  If the e-mail server your service provider uses does not support IMAP Idle, then you can do a scheduled pull, but not push e-mail.  No monthly fee, no complex setup, true push e-mail from almost any server that supports IMAP Idle (I have only found a handful of mail servers that don’t support this).  Push e-mail is a huge deal to me as I need access to server downtime information.  If a single server under my control dies, I need to know in real time.  SMS messages work here, but there is typically a 2 minute lag.  With push e-mail I typically know is a server is down within 30 seconds.  One would think that being a Microsoft OS and the huge Microsoft base of programmers someone would have created a push e-mail solution for Windows Mobile 5.0.  One would be thinking wrong.  There’s GoodLink, but it does not work on WM 5.0.  There’s the built in Exchange push, but we’re still waiting for a component to be released in early 2006 to fully enable this feature (although it is hacked together a bit now).  So from an e-mail standpoint, the PPC-6700, due to its use of Windows Mobile 5.0, has no good program.

How about the phone itself?  Honestly, this is a wash between the Treo 650 and the PPC-6700.  When the 650 was first released there was a huge problem with audio quality, but that has since been resolved.  Now it’s OK.  Not great, but OK.  The PPC-6700 is about the same.  The sound quality is not nearly as good as my wife’s cell phone, but it’s not bad.  I wish someone would build these devices with the thought of phone first, PDA second, but they all seem to get it backwards.

The next problem I have with the 6700 is the battery power.  I can run my Treo 650 for about 1 full day, or in my world 16 full hours before I need to recharge it.  Most people can run their Treo for 2 to 3 days between charges, but due to the mass amount of e-mail and phone calls I make, the battery gets drained fast.  The PPC-6700 ran about 3 to 4 hours before I had to charge it, and that was with most of the wireless radios off (Bluetooth and WiFi).  This is a jarring experience and simply won’t work.  What happens when I’m at CES and need to send messages back and forth?  I suppose I could just work in the morning, then take the afternoon off since my phone would be completely dead at that point.  The battery power in the 6700 is sad to say the least.

There are a lot of other interesting points to be made on the design itself.  I had to hack around and find a good balance between memory usage and display cache to get the device to work at a speed that was acceptable.  Oddly enough, when you first take the 6700 out of the box, it feels very, very slow.  To fix this one must go into the registry, change the display memory, and soft-restart the device.  Once this is done, it’s actually faster than the Treo 650, in my opinion.  This should have been done for me from the start.  The keyboard slides out from the side, which then rotates the screen.  I thought I would love this as it’s the natural way you want to view web pages.  Instead I found that the web pages rendered just as poorly at 320×240 as they did at 240×320, but now since the keyboard was sideways and longer, I could no longer type with one hand.  You must use both hands to type on the 6700, whereas on the Treo 650 this can be done with just a singe hand.  I also found that the 6700 can not be used without the stylus.  The 5 way navigation will work well most of the time, but in many applications such as Pocket Outlook and Pocket IE the navigation would not go where I needed it to, or just get stuck.  Once again, two hands were needed to operate the device.

The hard part for me is letting this device go.  I could live with two handed operation, possibly wait for a push e-mail client or for MS to finish their push support in Exchange, but the extremely poor battery life makes this device a dud for me.  I love the way the system syncs, it’s done so well that my schedule has been dead on for the last week and a half.  No more forgetting to hotsync, no more forgetting appointments or contacts, this device is darn sexy when it comes to syncing.  Upon reflection, I found that most of what I liked about the device was a Windows Mobile 5.0 feature, and most of what I didn’t like was a hardware problem.  I guess I’ll just need to wait for the Palm Treo 700w to come out on Sprint (or beg and plead TE to get me a Verizon version).  I love Windows Mobile 5.0, I just need one-handed operation, a better mail client, and much longer battery life.

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Happy Holidays From Waikiki!

Below is a simple list of the technology I am using while away for the Holiday’s in Honolulu:

1.  My new favorite car navigation system, the Garmin Nuvi 350.

2.  My old but tried and true Palm TREO 600 Phone, I am waiting to see the TREO 700 at CES

3.  My trusty Toshiba M2 Notebook running Windows XP Pro .

4.  2 EVDO PC Cards, one from Sprint and one from Verizon.  Only the Sprint card is connecting to EVDO as Verizon does not have EVDO Coverage in paradise yet.  Further the software that comes with the Sprint card is much easier to use, so I prefer it.

5.  An aging Plantronics HeadSet with Boom mic so as to use Skype Beta 2.0, if I could ever get a bluetooth headset to work reliably (maybe in 2006)

6.  A new Creative Labs Webcam Live Ultra for use with Skype

7.  A new Samsung L55W camera, if I could figure out the flash I think I would like it.

8.  A D-Link DWL-G730AP Wireless Pocket Router

9.  An old but useful Canon Elura DV camcorder to collect some quality video content

10. A simple yet effective 1GB SD card, which is compatible with TREO, Notebook and Digital Camera. Very handy to be in the same memory format.

What technology are you using this Christmas Day?

Merry Christmas and Happy Chanukah from the Technology Evangelist Family!

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If you have a Treo, it probably goes everywhere with you, right? Why not carry your music and podcasts with you by taking advantage of the phone?¢Ç«®Ç—¢s storage capabilities?

Here is how it?¢Ç«®Ç—¢s done:

1. SD Card: Treo 600 and 650 models (and reportedly, the yet to be released Treo 700 as well) have an SD Card slot. If you have an SD Card today, pop it out to check the size.

This is a 1GB SD Card.

This will determine how many songs you can store. An average song takes between 3-4MB of memory, so here?¢Ç«®Ç—¢s an estimate of how many songs you can store based on the size of your SD card: